blog · 13 August 2026 · 7 minutes

How to choose a software development partner: 7 checks before you pay

The development market is set up awkwardly for the buyer: portfolios are mocked up, reviews are bought, and the real quality of the work only shows a month after you have paid the deposit. We are a studio ourselves and know the kitchen from the inside, so we have put together the checks that take 15 minutes and filter out most problem vendors — including us, if we are not right for you.

Seven checks

• 1. Ask for links, not screenshots. Images in a portfolio can be concepts that never launched. A live project can be opened, poked at from a phone, checked for speed. If one out of ten works is clickable, that one is the real portfolio.
• 2. Find out who will actually do your work. In agencies one person sells and a different person, whom you will never meet, builds. Ask directly: who writes the code, who answers questions, how quickly. "Your personal manager will pass it to the team" means a game of telephone for the whole project.
• 3. Check the contract for three clauses. The price is fixed in the technical spec and does not grow. The work is delivered in stages, not as one lump at the end. Rights to the code, the design and the domain transfer to you after payment. If any of these is missing, negotiate before signing — afterwards is too late.
• 4. Ask how you will see progress. A good answer: a demo of working functionality at the end of every stage. A bad answer: "we will send you everything in two months." Two months of silence is plenty of time for a project to drift a long way off course.
• 5. Find out what happens after handover. Whether there is a warranty period for fixing faults, and how long. What an hour of later changes costs. What happens if the vendor disappears — whether you can hand the project to someone else (which is exactly why you need the rights to the code).
• 6. Time their replies before the deal. While they are selling to you, a vendor is as motivated as they will ever be. If they already take a day to answer, after the deposit it only gets slower. It is the simplest predictor of how communication will go.
• 7. Test their honesty with one question. Describe the task and ask: "maybe I do not actually need this?" A vendor who earns on trust will sometimes talk you out of it — suggest a site builder instead of custom development, a smaller scope, a different tool. Someone who agrees to everything is selling hours, not outcomes.

Red flags

How to compare quotes with different prices

Two proposals for "the same" task priced at $700 and $2,000 almost always describe different amounts of work — it just is not visible from the wording. Reduce both to one list: how many pages or scenarios, which integrations, who writes the copy, what happens with revisions and support. After that table, either the cheap offer turns out to be stripped down or the expensive one turns out to be padded, and the decision gets made on facts.

One last thing: ask for everything you were promised verbally to be put into the spec or into writing. Not because everyone lies, but because three months later both sides will honestly remember the conversation differently.